"Here's a character that starts off a jerk, and the middle of the way [through the story] he's a jerk," explains Kyle. "He's the guy you don't like, and it's a great job to try to find the story that can ask you to get behind this guy..."

Kyle says that part of the challenge of a character like Doctor Strange is in the portrayal of his powers - the guy can do practically anything after all... "The credit goes to [writer] Greg Johnson," he says, "and the beautiful job he did taking what was already there and finding a way to really make a wonderful story and figure out the laws of magic, so it's not just, 'A magic word can do anything I want.' Because it's really tricky. You've got a guy who can say and do anything he wants with a wave of his hand. What are you going to put him up against?"

So You Want To Be a Surgeon in the Marvel Universe [Polite Dissent]
Dr. Donald Blake demonstrates your various duties.

On the radar, due to Runners' Sean Wang art and interesting premise: Meltdown [Image panel at SDCCI]

A hero on the verge of burning out. Literally.

As the costumed crimefighter The Flare, Cal has never had an easy life. And now he's on the verge of an even harder death. Consumed by the very same fire powers that make him super-human, he finds his fractured life slipping away as he succumbs to the hell of a physical and mental meltdown.

During his final days, Cal must struggle with his volatile life and the questionable decisions he's made along the way, hoping to correct his many failures and find a final redemption before time runs out.

MELTDOWN, the all-new prestige-format color series from IMAGE Comics, heats up comic racks this Fall, with gorgeous artwork by Sean Wang ("Runners"), incomparable colors by Guru-eFX and script by David B. Schwartz. PLUS incredible covers by comics superstars CHRIS BACHALO and GREG HORN!

Spider-Man: Then And Now Panel at San Diego Comic-Con [Newsarama]
Stan Lee cracks 'em up. Also relates this Doc item:

Lee also admitted to speaking the dialogue as he would write, more often than not, doing impersonations of the characters that were talking. Asked by Marvel's Jim McCann about his Dr. Strange dialogue and incantations, Lee laughed, saying that he made up all the words used by Strange, but, as he would tour college campuses, would often be approached by students who said that they researched the incantations, and saw that he was referencing ancient druidic texts and spells. "All I could do was compliment them on their scholarship," Lee said with a smile.

Asked if he ever does impersonations of the characters he writes as he writes them, he told fans he could do a Sue Storm imitation, and promptly crawled under the table and continued to talk.

Paranoia in Online Fandom: Computer-Mediated Communication, Girls' Aggression, and Overanalyzing the Texts [Notes From The Tundra] [via Alas, A Blog]
Fans are over-analyzers: we over-analyze each other's comments online like we over-analyze the objects of our fandom- thus we fight. More at the links about paranoia and girls, too.

Sue Dibney and the Subject of Rape in Comics [Heaping Plateful]
The reaction of male fans that the strong Sue Dibney character is now "ruined" parallels the stigma sexual assault victims face in real life.

By the end of Ditko's relationship with Stan Lee and Marvel in 1966, Dr Strange and Spider-Man had reached a college campus audience and become pop-cultural icons. Indeed, Ditko's unique aesthetic was so fundamental to the flavour and success of Dr Strange that no subsequent illustrator has been able to match the character's enormous early appeal. (In October 1965, a "Tribute to Dr Strange" was held in San Francisco's legendary Haight-Ashbury district. The 'happening' combined costumed revellers and political activism with the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane.)...

Ditko's psychedelic artwork for Shade and Dr Strange held an obvious attraction for the titles' counter-cultural readership. (Tom Wolfe famously described the novelist and LSD adventurer Ken Kesey as spending "hours on end absorbed in the plunging purple shadows of Dr Strange...") However, the illustrator's unfashionable politics were most likely a different matter...

The author and eminent Ditko aficionado Blake Bell runs a website (www.ditko.comics.org) documenting the artist's work and influence. Interviewed in the Conservative Monitor, July 2002, Bell explained the conflict between Ditko's art and ideology: "Unfortunately, Ditko became obsessed with ['Objectivist'] philosophy and it drowned out dramatic pretence in his stories. They became tracts, instead of narratives, perfect examples of the greatest sin of storytelling - 'telling' instead of 'showing'. Given Ditko's attachment to a medium where one focuses on a main character, a hero, Ditko only focused on the already-perfect Randian protagonist, leaving no room for any intriguing character development. This is why his characters of the last 30 years are rarely memorable..."

Written by MARV WOLFMAN, STEVE ENGLEHART & ROGER STERN
Penciled by GENE COLAN, DAN GREEN & STEVE LEIALOHA
Cover by GENE COLAN
It's the Sorcerer Supreme against the Emperor of the Undead! Dracula wants Earth to fall under the spell of the Darkhold, but Doctor Strange has joined Blade and the Nightstalkers in a quest to vanquish all vampires! See the origins of vampirism itself unveiled! Guest-starring the Scarlet Witch and NEXTWAVE's Monica! Collects TOMB OF DRACULA #44, and DR. STRANGE #14 and #58-62.
128 PGS./Rated T+ ...$19.99

Also in October: For the Doc fandom overlap: New Hellstorm: Son of Satan miniseries
That character has never captured Neilalien's interest, but the "demons descend on Hurricane Katrina misery" premise of this miniseries does a little.

Marvel does not owe legendary respected comics creators work [Brevoort; follow-up]
Comics are just as tough, Darwinistic, beholden to changing tastes, and new/youth-oriented a town as any other entertainment business. The high sales of classic past runs are rarely recaptured. It's the plain truth- but "we don't owe you a second time" must still just sound cold to many observers who think Marvel should have compensated said creators better for/during the first time.

Vague overview of spat why we won't see Starlin working at Marvel again anytime soon [Lying In The Gutters]

A call for a standard tiered comic book rating system like they have for movies, TV and video games in our litigious world [The Trades] [via Blog@Newsarama]

You see, while the comic industry has done a fine job of telling the world that comics aren't just for kids, they've screwed the pooch, as it were, in communicating exactly which comics aren't just for kids, and how parents and retailers can easily identify them.

Stan Lee credits super imagination for success [Star Online eCentral]
Nothing new, and it may not even be true, but today Neilalien feels like having this piece of the mythology in his blog record, it's inspiring:

When he conjured up the idea of Spider-Man, it was immediately rejected by his publisher, Martin Goodman. He said, "'Stan, first of all, you can't call a hero Spider-Man. People hate spiders, so it's a horrible name. Nobody will buy the book. Secondly, a hero can't be a teen-ager. Teen-agers can only be sidekicks. The hero's got to be man. Thirdly, you want him to have problems? Stan, don't you know what a hero IS?'"

"He wouldn't let me do it," Lee shakes his gray head, "so I had to wait till a few months later we were doing the last issue of a magazine we were going to kill called Amazing Fantasy. When you're going to kill a magazine nobody cares what you're going to put in the last issue, it's going to die anyway. So to get it out of my system, I put Spider-Man in that issue and forgot about him. About a month or two later when Martin got the sales figures back. He said, 'Hey, Stan, remember that character of yours, Spider-Man, that we both kind of liked? Why don't we make a series of it?'"

Written by Brian Vaughan
Pencils & Cover by Marcos Martin
Doctor Stephen Strange embarks on the most important paranormal investigation of his career, as he sets out to solve an attempted murder... his own! And with his most trusted friend also at death's door, Strange turns to an unexpected corner of the Marvel Universe to recruit a new ally. Eisner Award-winning writer Brian K. Vaughan (Runaways, Y: The Last Man) and red-hot artist Marcos Martin (Captain America, Batgirl: Year One) join forces for an adventure that will take the Sorcerer Supreme from the underworld of New York City to the deadliest dimensions on the outskirts of reality.
This limited series will firmly establish Doctor Strange in the current Marvel Universe as well as setting him up to join a surprising new team!
32 PGS./Rated T+ ...$2.99

From Vaughan:

Strange can call upon Hoggoth and Watoomb all he wants, but his first allegiance is still to Hippocrates, and an oath he first swore as a young med student: "Do no harm." In our upcoming miniseries, artist Marcos Martin and I are going to be introducing a new threat to Stephen's life that will really challenge that belief.

I love Ditko's design and the trippy visuals that go with it, but over the years, I think we've focused too much on the "Strange," and not enough on the "Doctor." It's such a classic Stan Lee touch to make the Sorcerer Supreme a man with a background in science and logic. My favorite panel from Doc's origin involves the arrogant Stephen looking down at his trembling hands right after he crashes his sports car, knowing that he'll never again be able to perform surgery. How cool that this guy can cast any spell imaginable, but he's reminded of his own flaws every time he picks up a drink, and hears the ice cubes rattling inside the glass.

We all worked hard to make this miniseries completely accessible to anyone, especially readers who who've never really liked the character. Some of the best Strange stories have been his solo investigations into his own weird corner of the Marvel Universe, while some of his worst have involved him showing up like a mystical deus ex machina to save the Fantastic Four or whatever. That said, we are going to be giving Strange a new partner from elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, an existing character who no one will expect, but who complements the good doctor perfectly.

WIZARD: What about doing another comic book film - are there any you'd be interested in?

PAUL GIAMATTI: Well, I wouldn't be right to play Dr. Strange, but I wish someone would make a really kind of psychedelic "Dr. Strange" movie - a really adult, psychedelic movie and all of the things Dr. Strange did in the comic. I would love to see something like that. You could do a really trippy, sort of crazy thing. He could fight Satan and go to all kinds of different dimensions.

Congratulations to uber Dr. Strange fan Howard Hallis and his new bride as they begin their expedition into the mysterious and wondrous Dimension of Marriage!

Harnessing the Power Cosmic [The Hurting]
Great lovenote to the Silver Surfer. Doctor Strange fans will find many parallels, including:

The problem with the Surfer is that he is an extremely difficult character to write well. Although there have been many good Silver Surfer stories, there have also been a pile of pointless, redundant or just plain stupid Surfer stories, the likes of which make the character's fans grit their teeth in consternation. In this respect the character shares a lot with Doctor Strange. Both characters possess immense power, and both characters' adventures can be near-limitless in scope, or at least only limited by the writer's imagination. But because of these attributes, many writers just plain don't seem to understand how the characters need to be written. They can't just be plugged into a villain-of-the-month superhero format. They have very specific genres (speculative fiction and high fantasy, respectively) and they don't need to be changed in order to fit into genres that specific creators may have more experience with. Shoving Dr. Strange into a massive crossover like House of M doesn't make any sense considering the fact that anyone reading the story has to basically ignore the fact that Strange could singlehandedly fix the problem himself with the right spells.

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